Fedora Weekly News Issue 255

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 255[1] for the week ending December 8, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Our issue starts off with two announcements, including a reminder about Fedora 12's end of life, and a survey for Fedora Weekly News readers, requesting feedback on FWN as it transitions to the Drupal-based Fedora Insight. In Marketing team news, more discussion around the FWN survey, and coverage of the latest Marketing team meeting. Two more articles about Fedora "In the News" this week around packaging Unity for Fedora. Ambassadors reports eight new Fedora Ambassadors from eight different countries this week, along with the very helpful summaries of discussion from both the Ambassadors and FAmSCo lists. Quality Assurance reports on several work items, including a call for test cases of automated storage testing in Anaconda, blocker bug and update tracking process improvements, and development of a critical path test case creation process. In Design news, lots of activity around the FUDCon 2011 Tempe t-shirt design, and the announcement of a new Design team blog to better communicate the team's activities. Our issue comes to a completion with updates on the latest security-related package releases over this past week for Fedora 12, 13 and 14. Enjoy! As a personal note, thank you to everyone who has taken the time to provide feedback in the FWN survey so far. It is much appreciated, and will provide direction for an improved FWN to meet your information needs about the Fedora Project.

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues[2] on the Internet Archive. If anyone is interested in helping spread the load of FAWN production, please contact us!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[3]. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

Fedora Announcement News

Fedora Weekly News Reader Survey: feedback requested!

Pascal Calarco solicited[1] feedback on Fedora Weekly News via a survey, open to all readers:

"Fedora Weekly News (FWN) is the weekly newsletter for the Fedora Project, reporting on activities, developments and news about Fedora. FWN is planning to transition to a new Drupal-based platform for workflow, editing, publishing and dissemination, and, in advance of this, we would like your feedback on how you, the reader, uses FWN and solicit ideas for improving the quality and service of FWN to meet your needs!

We invite you to provide us feedback on Fedora Weekly News via an anonymous survey, below. This will be valuable as we integrate FWN into our new Drupal-based news and information portal, Fedora Insight[2]. The survey shouldn't take more than about 5-10 minutes of your time. Thanks again!

There were no Development announcements in the past week aside from the Fedora 12 EOL notice, above.

Fedora Events

Fedora events are the exclusive and source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

Marketing

On the idea of make a Fedora Weekly News Readers survey, Jesus Franco[1] offered a couple of options. Pascal Calarco drafted a survey[2] and asked for feedback. Neville Cross[3] pointed that spreading the survey may also help to spread the Fedora Weekly News. Mel Chua[4] said that this makes sense from budget perspective and offered to pay for the use of Lime Survey services. Robyn Bergeron[5] gave valuable feed back to make the survey more easy to fill out. She also declared herself a fan of Limesurvey. Pascal[6] posted the final version of the survey.

As any other Tuesday, Marketing meeting took place and minutes are available to the public[7]

Unity Desktop Possibly Coming to Fedora (Phoronix)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1] a posting on the Unity Desktop possibly coming to Fedora:

"Adam Williamson has shared that he's looking at packaging Canonical's Unity desktop for Fedora. "Why? Well, a few reasons. Mainly, Unity’s an interesting project. I want to look at it and compare it to GNOME Shell and I think quite a few others do too, so it seems nice to package it so you can run both on Fedora. I don’t really want to maintain an Ubuntu install just to test Unity (can’t do it in a KVM VM as it requires compositing support). Also, though, I think it’ll do a bit to help keep everyone honest: if other projects show interest in providing Unity as an option for people to use, it increases the motivation for Unity's developers to make sure it can be easily built without non-upstreamed changes. Hopefully it also increases the motivation for upstream projects to work with the Unity developers to get their changes merged. It's the same for any project, really – if you have a wide base of users of a project across many distributions, it gives everyone involved a reason to work to make sure it's easy to maintain the project across distributions."

Fedora Moving to Unity Too! (Ostatic)

"Despite all the negative reaction to Ubuntu's move to Unity, is it possible that another popular distribution is going to walk in its footsteps? Do they want to experience the backlash and exodus of users? Do they want to be subjected to a barrage of criticism? Well, no, not really. But Adam Williamson is working on making some Fedora packages for those that might want to test and run it.

In a blog post today Williamson announced that he's going to give it the ole college try. But according to him, it's going to be quite the undertaking. He said, "I'm just started at the bottom of the dependency pile and seeing how far I can get. So far, I have review requests in for libindicator and dee. I need to do nux, and after libindicator goes in, the actual indicators. The remaining dependencies are a bit trickier."

Buddhika Kurera suggested [16] asking each Ambassador to have a responsibility to organize at least one event a year to spread Fedora in the community. Max Spevack agreed [17] about the need to Hall Monitor the thread

Joerg Simon informed [7] about the onset of the FAmSCo election period expressed hope about helping the new team with the transition. Paul W Frields took time to thank the current FAmSCo [8] and noted the exceptional impact it continues to make on the community

Paul W Frields mentioned [10] that being no longer the Fedora Project Leader, the new FAmSCo should feel free to consider removing him from the FAmSCo list

Joerg Simon responded [11] to a sponsorship request around FOSDEM'11 and provided his opinions on the FAmSCo list

Pierros Papadeas posted [12] the agenda for the FAmSCo meeting on 2010-12-11. The thread [13] has discussions about other items as suggested by members of the new FAmSCo

Max Spevack requested [14] that Harish Pillay be provided view access to the tickets on the FAmSCo trac instance as he is the primary point of contact for budget stuff in the APAC region. Joerg Simon informed about it being done [15]

Blocker bug tracking process improvements

Following some discussion on possible improvements to monitoring blocker bug trackers[1], Bruno Wolff provided some prefab Bugzilla queries for finding blocker bugs which have been closed but not verified[2], to help ensure that blocker bugs do not drop off the radar if they are improperly closed.

Update testing process improvements

Kevin Fenzi posted a call for ideas and comments on potential improvements and adjustments to the update testing processes[1]. An extensive discussion followed, and the various ideas presented and discussed will feed into FESCo's consideration of the topic.

Critical path test case creation process

Adam Williamson announced[1] that he had opened a trac ticket[2] to track the creation of a framework for package-specific test cases to aid the critical path package update testing process. Several recent discussions within both the development and QA groups had reinforced the need for specific test cases for critical path package updates, and he planned to create a framework to aid the creation of these tests and their integration into Bodhi, fedora-easy-karma and similar tools.

Design

FUDCon T-shirt

Emily Dirsh proposed[1] a T-shirt design for the Tempe FUDCon "It's inspired by the art of the Hohokam who once lived in the area" and after an initial warm receive[2] from Máirín Duffy "Wow that is **gorgeous**, I love it! I would love a shirt with that design in it!" she followed[3] with a couple of variations "Ooh, I love the idea of a navy shirt! Yeah, the advantage to a single-color design is it's very easy to adjust the color." Jef van Schendel also proposed[4] a few remixes "Here's a few quick and dirty stabs at a dark shirt version".

Design Team Blog

Máirín Duffy announced[1] a new communication channel for the team "Thanks to Sijis we now have a team blog!! (Yay!!)" and she invited authors to join "Some members of the design team we couldn't add to the blog because their accounts weren't in the Fedora blogs system. If you'd like to be added, please log in to Fedora blogs to create your account, and let me know you've done it so I can request your account be added."